Karl Flach (entrepreneur)

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Karl Flach (born January 9, 1905 in Bonn ; † May 31, 1997 in Salzburg ) was a German entrepreneur.

In 1931 Flach took over the management of the company F. Blumhoffer Nachhaben GmbH , which was founded in Cologne in 1864 and which produced essences for beverage production. In the USA , he noticed the idea of franchise systems and the caffeinated lemonades from Coca-Cola that were already known there . He had the lemonade Afri-Cola developed and produced in Germany , the trademark rights of which he secured worldwide on June 26, 1931.

In 1936 Flach attempted to portray the Coca-Cola Company as a Jewish company by showing photos of the competing product Coca-Cola with bottle caps labeled in Hebrew on advertising slips . This campaign was discontinued following an injunction.

Grave site of the Flach family in the Melaten cemetery, Cologne

After the war, the brand also benefited from the West American lifestyle, which was becoming modern in West Germany. Their market share in the segment was never more than 1%, because the monopoly-like dominance of two American cola brands was too great. Not least because of the campaigns with photos by Charles Paul Wilp , Afri-Cola with the white palm temporarily became the most famous German beverage brand. From 1952, Flach introduced a second successful brand, the Bluna orange lemonade . From 1965 he sold them in a waist bottle with two side troughs, designed by Jupp Ernst in 1962 . The aggressive advertising began in 1968 with the slogan “Sexy-mini-super-flower-pop-op-cola - everything is in afri-cola. Germany is in an afri-cola frenzy. "

Karl Flach retired from the business in 1988 and handed it over to his son Alexander Flach. The Afri-Cola brand became an international licensed brand of Mineralbrunnen Überkingen-Teinach in 1999 .

Karl Flach died on May 31, 1997 and was buried in Cologne's Melaten cemetery (Hall 20 in E).

Individual evidence

  1. Jeff Shuts: The Refreshing Break; Marketing Coca Cola in Hitler's Germany ; in: Swett, Wiesen, Zatlin: Selling modernity; Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany , Duke University Press, 2007, ISBN 9780822340690 , pages 164-167.
  2. ^ Josef Abt, Johann Ralf Beines, Celia Körber-Leupold: Melaten - Cologne graves and history . Greven, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-7743-0305-3 , p. 177